Adam Torres and Keyan Razi discuss entrepreneurship.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Listen to coverage of GifterX Talks in Miami, Florida. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Keyan Razi, Founder & CEO at ImpactNEXT, explore entrepreneurship and an upcoming partnership with Mission Matters.
Watch Full Interview:
About Keyan Razi
Keyan combines technology and marketing and builds businesses in multiple industries. Applying SEO and other online marketing techniques to real estate investing, own product development, and e-commerce allows him to dive into many different niches while building impactful tools that others can use.
His passion is building incredible things using technology. The best way to do that is by starting and/or growing businesses that mean something to other people.
About ImpactNEXT
At Impactnext, they believe in helping businesses use the power of the internet to grow and reach more people. They bridge the gap between the business and its customers by making it easier for the customer to find them. They also bring them a service where others have failed to deliver, and get excited when their clients get excited. What they offer is SEO that brings real results so that businesses can be seen by the customers that are looking for them.
Visit ifwblackbook.com and use the coupon code “mission” to claim your free book!
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right. So I am in beautiful, sunny Miami, and we’re shooting this series with Gifters X Talk.
And today my guest is Kian Razi, a longtime friend. Kian, welcome back to the show, man. Appreciate it, man. Thank you. It’s been, you were on one of the original ones. I feel like mid, like money matters when we were doing something live. That’s like eight years ago, seven, eight years ago. Oh, good times. Well, good to have you back.
We got, you know, we upgraded a little bit. We got headsets now and things. I feel like when you were on the show, I think we were doing on the cell phone. Yeah. We’re doing some cell phone stuff. You know, it was, it was pretty like bootstrap beginnings, right? Come on, man. Hey man, humble beginnings. We’ll take it.
We’ll take it. So first off, we got a lot to talk about today. So I want to talk about IFW. I want to talk about our partnership, some of the things that we’re going to be bringing to the Mission Matters community, a whole bunch of things to talk about. But let’s go a little bit further behind. For you, you’re my marketing guy.
You’re my SEO guy. You’re my go to, whether you want to be or not. For me, Kian’s that guy that, you know, you got something that’s blowing up. I’m always like, Hey Kian my programming skills are a little off. Talk about your background in marketing. Yeah, sure. So I started off more as a software engineer for 10 years and then I started getting into marketing.
As I wanted to build my own tools, my own products, I decided, well, I better know how to sell it. And when you met me, I had just started really getting into marketing, doing SEO for clients nationwide and locally. And so ever since then, it’s just been a big process and learning how to do marketing, just beyond the technical level, going into media, buying, doing copywriting, Figuring out how to create offers and really give something to people that one makes sense to make some impact for their business and three, they can scale and I can give value to them constantly.
So I got a story I want to bring out here because I told this story in the podcast before, but it’s fun that people get to see the names and the faces behind them. So for the listeners that have been watching for a long time. I always tell them at one point we rebranded from money matters, top tips to mission matters.
And during that point, there was a nine, you probably don’t remember this part. It was nine days. We did it in nine days. So we launched 32 new social media channels, eight new podcasts. We separated all the shows. We niched everything out. And then somebody got a phone call about, Hey, I need a website. And yeah.
Talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, first of all, that’s no small feat, right? Doing all those social media accounts, connecting them together, getting all that stuff done. Yeah. Man, there’s been a few of those phone calls. You call me up and you’re like, look, man, you know how good I am at programming. However, there’s just this one thing I’m trying to figure out.
I think it started off with, yeah, we need to get this new website up, but you wanted help with a banner. Yeah, it was a banner. Yeah, it was small. I sucked you in real small. Yeah. Yeah. But it was fun. I mean, the origin story behind mission matters, right? So yeah, just got you set up and you guys took it from there, man.
You guys have built such an incredible brand and worked with so many people since then. It’s. Amazing to see. And for everybody watching and listening, just so you know, this was not a small task. Like it was, I dumped a whole website on him and I said, we need this to happen like yesterday. And there was a minimum at this point.
I don’t know if we were approaching a thousand pages on the website yet, but we were North of 500. Like this was not a small task. I mean, Keon came through and he’s like, all right, what are we doing? How are we doing this? And he, he did it within nine days. I think he did in like five days, actually. The other four was me freaking out and other things.
Nine days later, the rebrand, everything else. And you are my go to. And that’s why, as you’ve been telling me, and we’ve been getting, I’ve been getting more acclimated in your current projects. I mean, I know you do a lot in real estate as well. I know you do a lot of investing, trading, a lot of other things, but IFW, I’m like, wow, finally, I think we have something that we can partner on and I can bring to the Mission Matters community as well, which I’m excited about, because I know your work.
I’ve used your work for a long time and now I get to bring it to the community as well. So. Maybe start off by talking a little bit more about how IFW came to be. Yeah, sure. So as I went from marketing and got into the real estate investing world, I started off as a marketer in that space. Built tools for people.
And then I realized I have a lot of friends in real estate. Yeah. Why don’t I also get involved? And so we started a real estate company in the first 12 months. We acquired about 2 million worth of properties, most of which were under 150, 000 in value, raised a lot of capital in that process. So as we started doing that business, I realized I am meeting a lot of folks who are investors, Wealth builders, financiers, all this kind of stuff.
And I started developing some partnerships and some relationships with folks. And since then I have gone into business acquisitions, either full businesses or getting partial ownership and working on maintaining and building those organizations. And so the IFW came to be because a group of us essentially said, we have combined like 30 plus years worth of investment experience.
Why don’t we provide a service to business owners? So IFW is investment finance and wealth, and we call it the IFW black book. So essentially the black book is a way for people to become part of a community and have access to experts in each of those fields. So wealth building might be related to how do you build a legacy?
How do you build insurance plans with cash value that actually have compounding interest? How do you invest in things? The investment side has a little bit of overlap with that. That could be real estate investing. That could be investing in businesses. It could be investing in your own assets, passive revenue sources.
And then the finance side is, well, how do you get lenders and raise capital? And we decided that our first entry point for most folks, most business owners. Everybody needs money in business and there’s a lot of ways to get capital. However, there’s a lot of institutional capital that they don’t know how to get.
A lot of that information is the same as it was 15 plus years ago. It just seems like a very mysterious or arduous process to actually get to it. And so we started off by creating a we call it the do it yourself business credit compliance blueprint. And essentially it’s the exact process everything from step one to a hundred of how do you build a business credit?
So that’s Something that allows businesses to actually create a credit profile in their business rather than their personal credit and gets them access to bank lenders, institutional funding, business credit cards, lines of credit funding that puts cash in the bank for that business. The reason why that’s most impactful is because any business can save money.
Do some sort of expansion or growth that can take a long time. And a lot of times there could be some type of event that forces you to use that cash, right? But if you have the credit available, you can go ahead and use that credit, expand, increase your income, and then pay back that credit in half the time than it takes to save that actual cash.
And so that’s what we’re teaching people now. Why do you think the business credit field or industry is so convoluted? Like there’s so much misinformation. There’s so many things out there. Obviously I know your style when you were going to build the product originally, like you always want to bring the best.
Like, why do you think it’s so convoluted? I think for one, it’s just not something that most business owners are ever exposed to. So there’s no reason for that field to really change or iterate. The other side of that is it’s a very administrative heavy type of process. So similar to personal credit building.
That’s typically a little bit easier than your business side because you, you get offered credit cards pretty quickly and all you have to do is essentially pay those things on time. Use them responsibly. But with a business credit profile, you actually have to go get net 30 accounts. You have to get trade lines.
You have to buy products and pay them within a certain time frame. And then build from there. And the thing is most businesses fail within five years. So building a credit profile under a business is much more valuable than just a regular personal credit one, because it takes effort to actually make it happen.
When you have that business credit profile, a lender or a bank is actually going to look at that and say, okay, you have revenue, you have tax returns. You have. History that says your business has been operating and paying things financially responsibly. Right. And so it’s just more of an administrative process that people have never heard of.
Never been exposed to. And when they are exposed to it, they feel like it’s really tough. And so there’s never been a need for iteration. Something that I’ve noticed is when somebody is going into thinking about building business credit or otherwise, they’re thinking, you know, that’s only for the large business or that’s only enterprise or middle market.
It’s not for a small business. Like, where do you stand on that? I think any business should be focused on building some business credit. Very common ones now are e commerce businesses. Usually they’re very small. They’re just a startup LLC and a business credit profile may take, you know, three, six, 12 months to build, but there’s a lot of that process that you can start from day one that will get you going because the process might take a year, right?
So if you start doing some of those things right up front, then six months down the line, when your business is up and running, you’re producing revenue, you’re already halfway through. So now all you need is increase that revenue a little bit. Get some trade lines that have some of those, the products that you’ve purchased and paid them off.
They’ve been reported to the credit bureaus as good. And for any business, I mean, in e commerce store, you might start off with a thousand dollars, 2, 000 in inventory will buy the time that you’re ready to expand and drop 20, 30, 000 into wholesale product. You have a line of credit ready to go. Right. One of the things I like to do is, is provide actionable tips to our audience.
So obviously everybody’s going to be a little bit different, but what are some things, if somebody is watching this right now, they, they haven’t really gone down that line, they’re thinking about doing it, but they don’t know if it’s exactly for them, like, like where does the beginner start? What should be some things that they’re thinking about today?
Yeah, the most important thing for a beginner is if you have a registered LLC or any type of business corporation that’s ready to go, it’s got an entity, you’ve already registered it, make sure that you go and get a Dun Bradstreet’s number. Those are free to get. You simply go to Dun Bradstreet, register your company.
Now you’ll have a number. And then the next thing that you can do is simply start researching some of the trade lines that you can go after. And you can, you can surf on Google and you’ll find like the first few pretty easily. Granger is one, Uline is one, like all these different brands where you can get an account that allows you to get a bill and pay that invoice over time.
And then you just buy something worth of, you know, 30, 40 and you pay that off within 15 days. That’s a really easy way to start building business credit. You have the Dun Bradstreet number, which is basically like your FICO SSN, right? And then when you get a trade line and you pay those invoices off, they get reported to that particular business and Dun Bradstreet will actually receive that.
And they’ll create and keep track of what’s called a paydex score. That paydex score will basically tell lenders that you pay your invoices on time in a net 30 account. And it’s the easiest way for anyone to get started for very cheap. So I know that there is so much more to this, not only to the business credit, but also to what you’re going to be doing with IFW overall.
How do people follow up with you? How do they learn more? Like, how do they get more value? Yeah, certainly. So we have a product that we have been selling to the. helps them learn about business credit and getting started. However, for mission matters, folks, if you go to I F W blackbook. com and use a coupon code mission, we will let all of the viewers have our book for free and that gets them started, gets them introduced into building business credit.
the right steps they need to get started for any type of business, regardless of size, how new it is, revenue status, that’ll be the easiest way. And as a bonus of getting that product, they will have a link to the Facebook group. So they’ll receive an invite to the private community and that’s where they can start learning more about all three sectors, investment, finance, and wealth, and get to see some experts come in there and provide some more value.
Amazing. What’s that website again? I F W black book. com. I F W black book. com. And then it’s a coupon code mission mission. Fantastic. Well, Keon, thank you for coming on the show today. This is a lot of fun. I’m excited for what we’re going to build and how we’re going to continue to partner with each other.
I know a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives that are watching this. Definitely want you to go check out that link. We’re going to put it in the show notes. So you can click on it and head right on over. Speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing on new guests, bringing you new content, and hopefully more inspiration for your journey so that you can succeed. Again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Kian, thanks so much, man. This is fun. The reunion. Good to be back on.